Tea at Trianon: Impression, Sunrise (1872)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, September 13, 2024

Impression, Sunrise (1872)

From ArtNet:

On a November morning in 1872, Claude Monet set up his easel and began furiously painting the foggy scene beyond his hotel balcony. As a Normandy native, Monet knew Le Havre’s habor well, but he captured it like never before.
Freshly returned from London, where he’d admired the watery, smog-drenched atmospherics of J.M.W. Turner, the 32-year-old went further than his British predecessor, drowning the industrial seascape in a green-gray haze. Figures were bold outlines and the sun a tight ball of orange ricocheting across the water. Monet completed the work in a single sitting, and the offhanded name he lent it ahead of a revolutionary 1874 exhibition would come to connote an entire movement.

Impression, Sunrise has crossed the Atlantic for the first time as the centerpiece of “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. After debuting at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in spring, it’s the second port of call for the show, which commemorates the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition.

Through period photographs and 130 works, many of which were featured in the Paris exhibition, “The Impressionist Moment” seeks to add context and clarity to the 1874 show whose moment in the sun was fleeting, even if it now claims a long shadow. (Read more.)